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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26779240">Radioactive Cxck Scorpions</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account'>orphan_account</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Cities of the Red Night - William S Burroughs, The Magus - John Fowles</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 04:54:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>9,444</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26779240</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Darren goes to Greece thinking he's going to teach English. The Family of Blood have other ideas.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Radioactive Cxck Scorpions</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>RADIOACTIVE CXCK SCORPIONS</p><p>Jimmy lived on the farm in the deep West country. At night he could hear the howling of dogs across the border, and occasionally a single bark, answered by another, and another further off, the Dog Telegraph working the Marches, letting all dogs know that all was well. The howling was another matter; he wondered about that. Mum had spoken darkly of puppy farms and Jimmy could but think of those, poor dogs behind the wire, imagine a firework being let off behind your ears forever.<br/>
Jimmy's Mum taught at a local school, but not the one Jimmy went to - conflict of interest, she said. She also ran, ran like the wind, across the fields and hillside tracks, two metres behind Bella, their black and grey lurcher attached to Mum by a bungy line.</p><p>Here is Darren in a converted tool shed that has been repurposed to a makeshift interrogation room. he has been tied to an iron bedframe and a pair of court stenographers are faithfully copying down his every utterance, which includes several chilling screams.<br/>
"I have issues with people like yourself," says his interrogator, a shadowy figure who introduced himself as Maurice 'Le Krak des' Chevalier. "Let me begin at the beginning.<br/>
"It is a hot day in the Fourfold Continent. You know, the one you won't find in the history books or the geographies before 1951. Did you know that? course you din't. You went to school and were a good little pupil I expect."<br/>
"I grew up," says Darren, "in the shadow of that grotesque dwarf who runs the Queen Victoria in Battersea."<br/>
"Ahah," says Maurice C. "And so your nostalgia involves railway arches, dogs homes, Irish pubs, the craic on every street corner." He smiles. "I remember Digbeth in the rain, the smell of rotting vegetables, the pall of smoke from burning pallets, the frightened whinny of horses from afar off. The stench of the bullring. Once a Brummie, I suspect, always a Brummie. I carry Birmingham in my heart.<br/>
"But I digress. It is as I say a hot day in the Fourfold Continent. The place is full, literally full of shadowy old houses, cursed families, feuds that are older than the land itself. Families whose curse is that they married into something not entirely human, red-eyed creatures that nowadays we would term aliens but which for them were demons.<br/>
"Did you wonder about your grotesque dwarf, Darren? Did you never wonder about the phrase 'it resembled a hideous dwarf' and whether it might fit in your case, and what it implied? Have you, for you clearly did not, never watched any classic television sci-fi and I don't mean Captain Kirk? Means nothing to you, does it Darren? Vienna?<br/>
No, but it should be obvious that we are dealing with the same thing. Uplifted proto-simians. Insectile aliens which the ancients called devils. Red eyes in the sunset.<br/>
But where are we, he muses on. You and I, in this hot dusty place where the stench of blood is as common as the scent of blossoms and both are equally nodded over by the sage stone buddhas of empty eternity.<br/>
That is the only freedom, says Maurice. The freedom to cut people in half and have your way with the lower end while the upper tries to escape. The liberty to take your powerdrill and your hole saw attachment and your breadknife and try them on the skull of your captive. The tinsel to tie a rocket to the genitals and set it to fly. It is very important that we have that tinsel. Very important, is tinsel.<br/>
The rocket technique, he says, was a common punishment in San Culebra. It is known as the radioactive csck scorpion. You will perhaps not be aware that San Culebra's full name is San Culebra del Porco - the snake-pig saint. Half snake, half pig and of course this cannot be, so our friends the demon/aliens have had a three-elbowed hand in it somewhere. The island pigs are venomous, did you know that?<br/>
No?<br/>
Their tusks carry a neurotoxin that doesn't kill humans, but causes cringing agony so terrible some have cut their limbs off rather than endure the pain. Fortunately they are shy and if one gores you, then you must have been doing something to really piss it off, so don't do that. The locals don't eat them so that isn't an issue. [Their diet consists mainly of vegetables, fruit and fish and the local beer known as grooth which is fermented from root veg and has attested hallucinogenic properties.]<br/>
One end of a line round the rocket, muses Maurice, the other round the dumpennente, light the blue touchpaper and off we go.<br/>
He closes his eyes, musing on hot days, the howl of the rocket, the scream of the one it is tied to.<br/>
What are you, says Maurice.<br/>
I am the new teacher, says Darren.<br/>
You are an errand boy, says Maurice. Sent to collect on a butcher's bill.<br/>
The power drill in Maurice's hand whines, the hole-saw attachment spins.<br/>
So no half-snake half-pig mutants then, says Maurice. A 'snake pig' because it's a pig that has venom like a snake. That's all it was.</p><p>I had no idea who Maurice was. I suspected he was a scion of that old, old family of blood that ruled the Appalachians from centuries back, before the United States was even remotely a thing. He was not, it was almost certain, what he claimed to be. Had he not referenced Obadiah Munt and the man's insane demand that he, Maurice, commit a live trepanning upon the person of a captured drug dealer ... without benefit of anesthetic nor power tools? I suspected the original Maurice had died in that skirmish himself, the brace and bit screaming no less than Maurice as the blade bit into bone. And so this, Obadiah Munt himself, a man not entirely human, something of the devil about him, red eyes in the sunset. Surrounded by his family - psychopathic sadists! although that pretty much described the entire population of the villages thereabouts. In my hotel room with its ominously heavy furnishings I fired up the computer and its primitive modem and was completely - as I had supposed - unable to find anything on Munt, Obadiah. In my previous researches into the gangs of our city nethers I had been aware that names and identities pass between denizens of that underworld, that a name is just a shirt to wear one day, less permanent than a prison tattoo. </p><p>There was Munt's suspicion that Maurice was a drug dealer himself, that the urbane outsider with his nice Ranger 4x4 in pearl white was there to sell substances to the youth of Muntville and the surrounding countryside.<br/>
Of course, said Munt, people like you are not permitted power tools. How do you think you are going to remove this man?<br/>
And I (said Maurice) saw that there was only one answer, just as there was only one freedom - the liberty and the tinsel to cut a hole in some individual's skull. If we do not have that liberty, then we are not free.</p><p>Because, said Maurice, otherwise you are lying. Of course you identify the only true freedom as the liberty to disembowel peasants and the rest of it. Because it is. in the way that fiction had long been about screaming abuse at things that do no harm and at people for things that weren't their fault. I no longer bother with it.</p><p>Edna O'Nebriate, a fortnight dead<br/>
forgot the bills and the lading<br/>
and the buying and selling. A seaswell<br/>
picked her bones in whispers</p><p>Edna was one of the seven-person crew of the Research Vessel You Could Have Done That Outside, whose mission to map the edge of the retreating icefloes in the Arctic was interrupted when the crew witnessed polar bears worshipping a vast cyclopean stone mass whose enormous base possessed five right-angled corners. The carvings on the huge edifice were described as 'indescribable' (yes I know, they can't have been 'described' then can they?) and 'tentacular'. They were rugose, squamous, inchoate, gibbous, blasphemous and they were eldritch. Definitely eldritch.<br/>
The You Could Have Done That Outside was found drifting among pack ice the following spring with its crew nowhere to be found. Taken in tow by the Norwegian tug Jarlsbogen it was towed towards land but during a heavy squall the RV disappeared never to be seen again. No wreckage was ever found and despite intensive search operations including infra-red mapping by an IOG-chartered aircraft, there was no sign of the boat. Rumours circulated including one that they had found a wormhole in both time and space and found themselves on the legendary Sexisland. There were those who said the Viking, last sighted steaming round in circles in the South Atlantic while claiming it was sailing round the world, had been the last craft to exit from the Sexisland. But mythical isles such as Maria Laxara, or the isles of the Blest, or those cannibal giants the Laestrygonians, were sufficient to build an entire new archipelago. The Fourfold Continent was precisely that: a landmass in the southern Indian Ocean that nearly all agreed had always been there; but a few wondered, and the old-timers remembered a time when there had been nothing but sea between South Africa and Australia, or thought they did, though who could be sure?</p><p>In the heat of a dry country i remembered my home town, how i would head from the town centre out and then turn right into a little street with a pub on the corner, a pub that for much of the time was derelict. My front door faced another. Nearby was a church. To arrive home I crossed the terminator between two postal areas. The dwellings on the far side had a different postcode. A buried watercourse passed nearby.<br/>
You aren't Darren any more, said Chevalier, or Munt, or whoever he was. Darren was full of lofty hate for the place he left, and you know why?<br/>
I could not answer.<br/>
Because he thought he was better than those around him, said Chevalier. Lofty disdain for people's lives. But now who is better than whom? You are a starving man in a dry season, far from home, waiting for the summer rain.<br/>
You know, said Chevalier, I dream of warren-like structures, places warm and cosy and full of love and light. Like a family for those who never had one. I think I am getting your dreams, Darren.</p><p>He was, too. Almost every night, ten or twelve years after leaving, my dream architecture was brick and geometric shapes. My art teacher commented on my love of geometric shape and I wonder if it came from that place. My art teacher was ex-Air Force and had swapped screaming at his charges for gently encouraging them. *no it wasn't Bob Ross.</p><p>I woke the next morning to find I was still incapacitated in the same bedroom, the same lazy fan flicking its way senselessly through sluggish air. Moving my slow limbs however i found I was no longer bound. My hands and feet were free, but I felt slow, so slow.</p><p>In front of me a tableau had been erected. A banner read,<br/>
THE DEGENERATION GAME<br/>
As i read this - I had trouble reading now, I noted to my satisfaction. Not physical trouble but it was a slow, hard effort like that of a very small child, tongue out and deciphering the letters.<br/>
There was a brief knock on the door and Chevalier entered.<br/>
Some can't read at all, he said. Many people around here, the Creek people, the Squatters, the rest of them. No use for literacy. Tis the gift to be simple and the gift to be free. That's Copland's Appalachian Spring but the spring's starting to run dry, so it's being rationed. Controlled. And as there's a fair few French-speakers in these parts, you could say it was Appalachian controllee.<br/>
GROAN, read a sign poked up above the banner. Something poked me in the head metaphorically - a vast dark undershaft, small pale people in the edges, the shadows, living in the cracks of the world-machine.<br/>
But you need cracks, said Chevalier. That's how the light gets in.<br/>
The sign had disappeared but I was fixated on one detail. I had seen the upper edge of the hand that held that sign - fair skin, a slight reddening perhaps, and scarlet fingernails. Intriguing. I had no idea that there was anybody else here. A Miranda to Chevalier's Prospero, perhaps. In which case, who was Caliban? Or had that been Sycorax, getting out of her tree on whatever Chevalier had fed me? Whatever it was, she had been here or sneaked into the room as i slept, secreted herself behind the banner.<br/>
Ariel, said a voice. You were wondering.<br/>
She popped up from behind the banner, hair as tousled red as I had expected, eyes of petrol blue. I know you, I thought.<br/>
Jeannette. Jeannette that I'd known years ago, a Masters' degree student who took up painting in the evenings so I met her in an art class in a Victorian school in the soft-lit backstreets. There was such a redness about her that she red-shifted the world around her, like the tiny demon she was. But that was -<br/>
- a long time ago, and in a far country, said Chevalier.<br/>
This young woman was dressed in a check shirt and, as she came round the side of the tableau, black leggings. So very much my Jeannette of years ago. </p><p>Old Meg she was a gypsy, sang Ariel -<br/>
and lived upon the moors<br/>
her bed it was the wild heath turf<br/>
and her home was out of doors</p><p>Curious, said Ariel, the not-Jeannette - though so very like her - that we care about women who dive headfirst into a bottle, but not about men. Of Edna O'Nebriate much is written while of her male counterpart - let's call him Edward - there is nothing. He can bunt off. </p><p>A seaswell pickled him three sheets to windward. Gentile or Jew,<br/>
oh you who haunt the bar and get plastered,<br/>
consider Edward, who was once handsome<br/>
and tall as you. And did not have a strawberry nose, liver failure and the inability to control his bowel movements.</p><p>I once wrote a children's book, said Chevalier. Here, see. And silent Ariel stepped forward and handed me the book, her tiny pale hand so very familiar - surely these same arms had held me tight as she and I made illicit love while her fiance was elsewhere?<br/>
The book had a bright cover showing a strange lay figure beneath an open window, faces looking out of the window as it lay on pavement below and the title<br/>
WHY CAN'T I DIE?<br/>
the author's name - Morris Cavalier - spoke bundles, of dodgy British motors from the 70s and 80s, mostly, but it was clearly our man if you had auto-corrected his spelling.<br/>
I was once walking across Hammersmith Bridge, said Maurice, when a young woman strode towards me, her face contented on that spring day. She smiled happily and jumped over the parapet. That has always stayed with me. The tide was low so there was further to fall - I believe the fall would be survivable with the river at its highest.<br/>
I love falls, Maurice said. It's the elegant simplicity of them.<br/>
I looked at the book. It told the adventures of a young rabbit called Anwar the Snit - the name echoed dimly for me - who despite trying several ways to die was unable to. Meanwhile his grandmother, Bessie, was clearly dying in her huge, white bed, a tiny face propped up in pillows. At the end Anwar, mad-eyed, on fire, screamed WHY CAN'T I DIE???? across two whole pages.</p><p>I knew a young woman once, Maurice said, who would sunbathe practically naked on the grass areas of our estate. There's a book about her as well, but that was a while ago, and the book is quite respectable and endearing. It's called "The Sweetest Lollipop Lady in the World" and you can buy it. She also used to cut my hair.</p><p>However you wanted my story, said Maurice. How about this?</p><p>A BOY AND HIS PONY<br/>
Once upon a time in the Wold, part 1</p><p>There was once a boy called Maurice Itzaquahuitl Jones, and he nearly deserved it. Kept in a barn by his half-insane mother and father and uncle - there were of course only two people there, as I am sure you will understand - he lay down with the pigs and got up with the cock (so to speak). By the time he was twelve years old he had developed full-spec PTSD due to the effect of having been treated as essentially a farm animal, and you can be sure the locals around there have specific use for farm animals. We lived in a village in that rare, shifty heartland that lies between England and Wales, a shadowy home of weirdness, old bear cults, forests that seemed to go on forever without end, nights whose darkness was not so much an absence of light as a physical thing.  I was named after Mother's car, a Bullnose Morris which had been, at some time, converted into a pickup truck and fitted, or so I believed, with a crude antigrav system for pulling it out of mud, though we had horses for that.<br/>
Dadda loved horses, in all possible ways. He was the Horseman, or so they said; the one who appears with the horses out of the storm, and vanishes with them. Whose feet may well be hooved in sympathy, or in some other emotion more suited to those wild, weird and above all wet places. At Christmas the people of those villages go from house to house with a creature called the Mari Lwyd; a horse's skull in a cloth and carried aloft on a stick, braided with flowers and garlanded. It is a thing out of nightmare, which suited it to the places we lived.<br/>
And yet, he spoke of the Bone Horse. Compared with which the Mari Lwyd was a mere toy, a taming of the creature, prettying it if one could actually pretty something as death-ridden and nightmarish as the Horse.<br/>
Horse lore is everywhere in the Land; the Blue Ribbon Oss and the Red Ribbon Oss of Padstow, the Mari Lwyd, the Bone Horse ... oh yes, that. Not what you want cantering and tittering its way down your country roads at night.<br/>
I had a teacher once, said Maurice, who maintained that the 'Obby 'Oss festival of Padstow must have been imported from Africa. Presumably because in his estimation the western English were too dull to have thought of such a thing. I have never understood why being politically on the left  - even assuming I were - seems to imply slagging off the English working class. It's also counter productive. By the time I actually met any foreign people I thought that was what you did when you encountered a nationality: slag it off. I didn't realise other countries actually took exception to that.<br/>
What happened to the teacher, I asked.<br/>
I have no idea, said Maurice. You know the usual sort of thing: retirement, home on the South Coast, accused of sexual impropriety with boys (which gives him another ten years' grace than if it had been girls, I am sure).<br/>
And the Mari Lwyd, he said, means 'Grey Mare'. Or it may. In which case it's Tom Pearce's ghostly Grey Mare that haunts the high roads. Dogs in the east, Black Shuck and friends; but in the south and the Western Lands it's the bone horse that drags our nightmares.<br/>
And the swans, Ariel said. There's the swans.<br/>
She sat on a low chair facing me. I was bemused. Surely that was Jeannette. The very same. Taut, fair-skinned and scarlet-lipped and flame-haired.<br/>
The swans, she said again. Or the Swan. The black, fire-eyed creature that haunts the Black Avon, the old-named Afon-Ddu. All oily feathers and slashing beak. They say if you travel upriver from Moreford at the Easter tide - the highest of all tides - you may, instead of simply gliding between stands of trees so ancient and dark they hide terrible stories, actually sail into the lightless lake where the Swan lives. A place of low mists, dim stars glimpsed as if those trees cut off all light from the open waters. A horrible creature it is, the Swan.<br/>
You're from those parts, aren't you, I said. I detect Welsh there somewhere.<br/>
I am indeed, said Ariel. Though each of us wear many masks. I grew up in a village near the border, and we had a swan festival, well, call it a festival see, it was more like a gigantic piss-up and all the men roaring at each other - we had a proper choir other times, bring you to tears they would with 'Sosban Fach', but there was a thing of just roaring at festival time. And all the ladies made welshcakes and went out into the snow to try and trap the Swan.<br/>
And what would you do with it, I said, if you trapped it?<br/>
It would do our bidding, said Ariel. Mind you, the story of Llyr and Ariel tells that Ariel claimed she trapped the Swan in order to make her father Llyr do her bidding.<br/>
Ariel, I said, that's you. Is he, Maurice, your father?<br/>
We all wear masks, said Ariel, avoiding my question. I see in your eyes that you knew someone like me.<br/>
Thought it was you, I said. But too long ago. Did you once study art in West London? And ride a bicycle?<br/>
I never lived in London, said Ariel.  And I had two sisters, one died young and the other lived in Cardiff. London, though.<br/>
Full of Welsh people, I said, encouragingly. Or it was. There used to be a whole culture, I'm sure you know. Welsh dairies. Morgan's Dairy, on Greyhound Road in Fulham. Sometimes I think I don't remember it and any memories are really of somewhere else.<br/>
They moved to Surbiton, said Ariel. Surbiton is the new Fulham, lost Fulham, and orange is the new black. How does it feel to gauge a trend slightly too early so you aren't the one who benefits from it, eh?<br/>
Why lost? I asked. I mean, why is Fulham lost?<br/>
Because nobody can afford to live there, said Ariel. If someone on a decent shall we say middle-management wage can't afford to live more or less where they like - excluding Millionnaire's Row but there's always one of those - roughly where they like, then there is something very wrong. That applies to London, but increasingly to Manchester, Birmingham - where my daddy here is from - and other cities.<br/>
You said he is your father, I said.<br/>
NOOO, Arial exclaimed. A Dark Knight of the Soul he may be, but he's not my dad. I said my Daddy. It's different. The children of Llyr were the spawn of darkness. Some say they're still out there, haunting the woods.<br/>
I'll bet they do, I said. And of course if you ask about them in a pub you will get a significant tilt of the head towards a near-empty pint pot.<br/>
Such cynicism, Ariel said, to assume the Children of Llyr were invented to milk free pints out of townies. No, that's the Loch Ness Monster you're thinking of. Let's not forget one of its leading exponents was Tim Dinsdale.<br/>
Dins - dale! I went.<br/>
Precisely, said Ariel. The Loch Ness Giant Hedgehog. Me mam loved Monty Python even if she admitted a lot of it was poor undergraduate humour. But no, no Nessie. The Swan though, and the Children of Llyr - quite another matter.<br/>
And you never lived just off the Fulham Palace Road, I said.<br/>
No, she said. Never.</p><p>Maurice had one childhood friend, Jimmy, who was English and so hated by all the Welsh and most of the English as well. Jimmy's mum ran with dogs. Jimmy's dad was a fan of Nebulous and in keeping with his Taoist beliefs worshipped Bod; while out of his tree on the fearsome local cider he would slash himself with kitchen knives and walk into the trees screaming,<br/>
"Kneel before Bod!"<br/>
This'd be the Dark Tao, said Darren. I'm not sure proper Taoists do Old Testamenty gods like that. They believe in the Tao instead; the Way and its Virtue, balanced lifeforce, the green that drives the fuze. Not feeding the trees with blood.<br/>
More fool they, said Arial. What's actually the point otherwise. As Epicurus said, either God is all-powerful or he is not God. And there's the bit about evil but that is by the by. I mean, Maurice was kept in a stable and used as farmers use farm animals. Jimmy was fine until the weird shit got going and then it was down in the cellar at age fourteen, you know the kind of stuff. At an age where most boys are accusing each other of being virgins he was the vessel of a manichaean cult called the Family of Blood. Which is pretty Taoist really, Dark and Light. Balance.<br/>
That sounds familiar, Darren said.<br/>
It is indeed, said Arial. And if you've ever listened to Nebulous you'll recall the increased number of continents. Believe you me, if it weren't for the Fourfold Continent we would be having this conversation at the bottom of the sea. Or more likely we would have drowned. Full fathom five, all that. Maurice and I washed up on these shores generations ago.<br/>
I've never heard of it, said Darren.<br/>
Not surprised, said Maurice. We touched on classic sci-fi, did we not. Not saying that Nebulous is but it takes swipes at just about every bit of British radio and TV skiffy since forever. They filled chalices with Jimmy's blood and drank it. In the end Jimmy got kimmeled.<br/>
Kimmeled?<br/>
Yes, kimmeled, said Arial. Consumed from within by the termites of self-doubt. Real termites, though. One day minding his own business to the extent that you can when you're basically a Receptacle, the next bleeding out and shedding shreds of internal organs all over the place.<br/>
Never heard it called that, said Darren. Mind you I've never heard of it. Either.<br/>
There seems to be much you've never heard of, said Maurice. </p><p>The way the air moves. The chill of the night wind. Lines of white cloud, rolling, marking the tops of a standing wave. A skylark chittering, rising and falling over grass. A biplane practicing the same manoeuvre over and over again, a distant speck over the downs, the sound of its engine coming through in waves, a long, long afternoon. The stately progress of balloons, silent but for the occasional blast of a burner.<br/>
And now it's the radioactive cxck scorpions, said Maurice. A dry season and a continent that never used to exist.<br/>
I was just a cat by a runway, said Darren. I might be best that way. We all might. I can't move my slow limbs, by the way.<br/>
True, said Maurice. The Children of Llyr, you see them, as my very good friend here has described. I cannot odds the Welsh for their poetic description of miserable darkness. Lovely. There's nothing wrong with loneliness, pain and darkness you know. They're just things. They say nothing grows in darkness, but that's a lie. Seeds do. And eventually they make their own cracks and that's how the light gets in.</p><p>Maurice, thought Darren. And Jimmy. The two lost boys, one kept as a farm animal, the other kept in a cellar, underground for who knew how long like Demeter. Waiting for what?<br/>
The Children of Llyr, it was clear. The Swan.<br/>
He could no longer feel his hands or feet. Arial stood over him, put a cool hand on his forehead. He remembered her room off Fulham Palace Road, white fading walls, her bed, her taut warm body in his arms, hurried sex leading to slow lazing in each other's arms afterwards.<br/>
You were love, he said.<br/>
Still am, she said with a smile, and replaced the hand with a brief, chaste kiss. Then she was gone. Looking round Darren could no longer see Chevalier. The tableau had been dismantled and he could see through the windows at a green, tangled landscape, and distant sea. I could die if I could see the sea, he thought. A bird drifted lazily across, floating on those wings he had longed for, but what, he wondered, is the use of wings if you can't fly?</p><p>He wondered about Jimmy being, what had they called it, kimmeled. Cored out by the termites or whatever they were. Here, in a dry season, such creatures would scritch and scrape. Jimmy died, bled out in a cellar or in the farmyard; Maurice survived. Which suggested that you could survive an encounter with the Children of Llyr, assuming he had. </p><p>And so we're back to the supposed Dark Buddhists although in this case it's more like Dark Tao, i.e. Yang (at least Taoists admit there is one although Balance is important for them as it is for Epicureans).<br/>
What's actually happening:<br/>
- Maurice is the survivor of a blood cult on the Welsh Marches that is connected to the mythical Swan and the Children of Llyr, themselves the folk-memory of an autochthonous race that vanished into the hills;<br/>
- His friend Jimmy was also involved with the cult but died;<br/>
- Darren is an itinerant teacher who finds himself drawn into Maurice's attempt to replicate the cult;<br/>
- Arial reminds Darren of a former girlfriend of his but it was long enough ago - a decade or more - that she hasn't aged while he has<br/>
- It's all basically "The Tempest";<br/>
- It takes place in the Fourfold Continent, which is comprised of mythical islands.<br/>
- What has Edna O'Nebriate to do with it?<br/>
- Everything.<br/>
The Family of Blood are balancing Light with Dark. Dark Is Not Evil is a common refrain; the concept of a Dark Tao is nonsensical because Taoism is about precisely that balance.<br/>
Ordinary people are bright;<br/>
I alone am dark. says Lao Tzu. Achieving endarkenment? It seems likely!<br/>
At night you can see all the Light of the Universe. </p><p>You're forgetting the five excised chapters of "The Magus" where Nicholas is kept in a cellar for six months, woken every few minutes if he tries to sleep, fed slops and worse, and ritually abraded from time to time as well as having the sound of terrified screaming piped to him 24/7. This would have made it a better novel. In fact being pulped would have made it a better novel. You could keep the WWII bit which has been published as a stand-alone story anyway, and save us having to read the 250,000 words of self-indulgent piffle that surrounds it.</p><p>"We'll treat you like a good wine, Mr. Urfe," Conchis said, stroking the white cat.<br/>
I soon discovered what he meant: kept in a cellar.</p><p>"In fact," said Conchis. "My soundproofed cellar, and you may wonder, in the same way you might wonder why you need a handle inside a door, why you need a soundproofed cellar."</p><p>It was cold and grey and wet down there. Every time I said that this reminded me of England, he laughed heartily and punched me in the face.</p><p>You are not James Bond, Mr. Urfe, said Conchis. I do not even expect you to die. Just talk, you're flirting. Suppose I was going to burn your tongue with a damn poker, and then? Hey?</p><p>I have no idea, I said.</p><p>No, damn it, it won't do, said Conchis. And he flipped a switch. I tensed, waiting for the screams to return.</p><p>The resulting electric shock curled me back and caused smoke to come out of my ears (I saw it later). I shouted in an interesting way, more than one gargle.</p><p>It was a common punishment in Phraxos, said Conchis. Ouzo?</p><p>"You'll never get away with this," I said.</p><p>Conchis just looked at me.</p><p>I know, I said. Cheesy line.</p><p>Conchis lifted one foot and stepped on my crotch. The world turned black. Painful, but black.</p><p>I could do that until it's a bloody piece of meat, said Conchis. He smiled happily. But not today, I think. I mean, we could fill this bunting cellar with concrete while you're still there. But where would the fun be in that?</p><p>And he flipped the switch again. The previous shock was just a tingling in comparison to the sustained explosion of electricity that ran through me. I could feel the hairs on my arms and legs singed and my skin filled with blisters. After several seconds, fortunately, it ended. I laid down. My throat hurt from the full-body scream I had let fly. I kept crying like a plane that just made a really bad landing.</p><p>Conchis was smiling broadly. He reached out and rekindled the screams, and left.</p><p>Next time ... masks, he said.</p><p>The next time was the time I woke up to find my ankles together and my bare feet pointing out from me, with my ankles resting on a stool covered in cold leather. Conchis was sitting in a chair watching me, with a finger on his chin.</p><p>I almost forgot, he said.<br/>
What do you think of cricket?</p><p>A terribly boring sport, I said.</p><p>Like you, said Conchis. Although maybe we've all been lying. And let's not forget the Australians and the Indians, the West Indians and the Pakistanis who have the grace to treat cricket as if it were a proper sport and not a kind of idiotic class thing.</p><p>I said nothing. Conchis got up, went to a large bag that was next to the wall and took out a cricket bat.</p><p>Bradman used one of these, he said. the best English willow, and as we all know, there are few sounds more beautiful than leather on Willow. Willow enjoys that kind of thing.</p><p>Conchis imitated a batsman in the fold. I thought it was good that the word was "batsman" and not "batman," or we would see players with capes.</p><p>And a quick way up, he said, lifting the bat. Of course, to knock out a googly off the field ...</p><p>He approached a few feet from my feet, withdrew the bat and with the alacrity of Len Hutton on a good day he swung it.</p><p>Pain, wild and indescribable, burst on the soles of my feet.</p><p>He drew back the cricket bat.</p><p>A few seconds later the second hit came. I could feel the small bones in my feet splinter and collapse. But mostly I could feel pain, thick and steady like molasses, running through me and dividing through my skin because I had nowhere else to go.</p><p>And then Conchis did it again.</p><p>I have not even mentioned the screaming, although I must have screamed my throat raw because Conchis was smiling like a wet pig.</p><p>"Bastinado," he said. "Useless as punishment because it makes the recipient unable to walk and, therefore, in most cases can not work, but, well, do we care about that? No. Well, it does not matter, I do not think we'll make you do that for a moment."</p><p>And the mists fell again.</p><p>The next time I woke up I could see what he was talking about. They had hung me, my wrists tied to a cross beam, my legs to an A-shaped frame. I was face down, or at least looking forward, and because of the feeling of air on my back and back I was naked. My feet in ruins were hanging.</p><p>It was the same basement; the same wine shelves, the same fan lazily rotating on the ceiling. The same soundproofing.</p><p>"In Ischia," he said, "I once saw a peasant castrated with wire cutters, or was he here? Dismembering, I mean, I do not remember, who is making the memory if I'm not who I think I am?"</p><p>Humanity is born free, says Arial from under the sheets on a sunlit afternoon. But is everywhere in trains. </p><p>We are the hollow men (says Chevalier, predictably I think as he is basically Kurtz). We are the stuffed men. Well, more accurately, you're stuffed.</p><p> </p><p>MR ELIOT REWRITES THE CRUCIFIXION</p><p>After the nails<br/>
and the crown of thorns<br/>
comes the light.<br/>
Sheets of blood<br/>
down my slow limbs. i scream<br/>
in the hot afternoon.<br/>
i remember<br/>
the scourge, Chevalier's whip.<br/>
the tacks driving into my skull. </p><p>A young man in a dry cellar<br/>
with no stone to roll away.<br/>
How long, he says,<br/>
do you think? give him<br/>
three days? that cocky bird<br/>
has crowed. I own no cockyright<br/>
on words.</p><p>Dark, dark, we all go into the dark.<br/>
Mrs Kimmel, Chevalier, Arial,<br/>
the shifting cast of gigglers.<br/>
The dead in the hot falls,<br/>
the seaswell picking her bones<br/>
in whispers.</p><p>If you came this way in spring,<br/>
flowering dogwood and larkspur,<br/>
leave it late in the evening,<br/>
bats hunting midges in the waning light,<br/>
and heard the far snickering of hooves grow near<br/>
and saw in the mists the Bone Horse<br/>
riding fleshless upon you.<br/>
If all time is present<br/>
all time is continual.<br/>
History is now, and here,<br/>
now and on Phraxos.</p><p>Et j'ecoutais les jeunes qui parlaient a la Sibylle et un d'entre eux lui demanda-<br/>
- Qu'est ce que vous savez a propos des Saphistes? Et elle dit,<br/>
- Elles ne l'aiment pas la-dedans, mon capitaine.</p><p>COCKY McCOCKFACE AND THE RADIOACTIVE CXCK SCORPIONS OF COCK</p><p>It was a fine April day and Cocky McCockface strode cockily down the high street of Cockville, CK. On godown walls scrawled the words<br/>
dim jerky faraway is close at hand in images of tangier<br/>
Cocky McCockface was a cock. A literal one. A cockerel. He heads on down the dusty street of Cockville. Don't go back to Cockville / and waste another gap yaah / dull screaming faraway on the moon. There is a sign on a lamp post HAVE YOU SEEN OUR CAT SYBIL.<br/>
Yes, I say, I saw with my own eyes the Sybil in a cage and when the boys said to her,<br/>
- What do you know about the people of Lesvos, she said,<br/>
- They don't like it up 'em sir.</p><p>'Rives Mathews really knows what happened to any so and so in St. Louis. His mother had been to dancing school with “Tommy Eliot”—(His socks wouldn’t stay up. His hands were clammy. I will show you fear in dancing school) ... dim flickering pieces of T. S. Eliot rising from the pages' - WS Burroughs, "St Louis Return", The Paris Review Fall 1965. Literally nothing is new including as we see here WSB already having written about TS Eliot when all I am trying to do is make fun of TS Eliot and use a bit of WSB while I'm at it. Nothing is new, everything is permitted. Old Bill Lee returns to St Louis his hometown and also TS Eliot's.</p><p>A Song for Simian</p><p>Lord, the Roman bananas are ripening in bowls and<br/>
OOK OOK  The winter sun creeps by the snow hill and throws itself into the dull canal;<br/>
The stubborn season has made us brachiate.<br/>
BE I UNTIL THE END OF MINE DAYS RENDERED.<br/>
My life is light, waiting for the death banana, cousin of the Gargan Death Carrot,<br/>
Like a panzee on the back of my chim.<br/>
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners and chimps.<br/>
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dry waterhole.<br/>
Grant us thy peace.<br/>
I have brachiated many years in this forest,<br/>
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor monkeys,<br/>
Have taken and given honour and ease.<br/>
There went never any rejected from my ook.<br/>
Who shall remember my family tree,<br/>
where shall live my children’s children<br/>
When the time of gorilla warfare is come ?<br/>
They will take to the elephant's path, and the battered sea-dog’s home,<br/>
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.<br/>
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation<br/>
Grant us thy peace.<br/>
Before the stations of the mountain of Ruwenzori, mountains of the moon,<br/>
Before the certain hour of lunar screaming.<br/>
Now at this birth season of decease,<br/>
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,<br/>
Grant Israel’s consolation<br/>
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.<br/>
According to thy word,<br/>
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation<br/>
With glory and derision,<br/>
peanuts and monkey-nuts also. Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.<br/>
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,<br/>
Not for me the ultimate vision.<br/>
Grant me thy peanuts.<br/>
(And a gorilla shall pierce thine antrum,<br/>
thine also).<br/>
OOH OOH OOH<br/>
AA AAA AA<br/>
EEK EEK<br/>
OOOOOOOOOOK<br/>
What did Christ say on the Cross? I do not know, for I am not the Christ. What is the theology<br/>
of Salvation among Apes? What is their Essence? On the third day,<br/>
apes beating a rock with bones. Won't you roll away the stone?<br/>
Last week I ran many miles,<br/>
the week before also,<br/>
this week I am Tapiring.<br/>
Let thy primate depart,<br/>
Having seen thy salvation. And grant me thy bananas.<br/>
OOH OOH OOH<br/>
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu Rl'yeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. And the tongues of apes scream in the syllabubs of the Old Ones' bower. Amen.<br/>
Oh you who turn the wheel and look to windward<br/>
consider fleabites who get under your fur and itch.<br/>
Pray for Louie King whose name is the reverse of the Swinger King<br/>
a man, a horn, a dark misty night, orange carriage lamps, the long improbable facade of an apartment block cresting a hill, the kind of place that haunts your dreams.<br/>
A long way up from the dull canals that encircle the city from far Worcester and the Welsh marches where who knows what kind of madness could go unnoticed. Fear death by water. Louie, the Hanged Man, way above the clouds. Kind of blue. He was less Tarot than Kabbalah and more than either, like his friend Bunny Yetholm he followed his own path or should it be his Way, The Tao Te Ching marked his path, finding his own ground like water.<br/>
What do you know about camping?<br/>
It's in tents.<br/>
Where the canal passes the Gas Street Basin and Broad Street and the shimmering bulk of the Great White Elephant and on into the Mailbox where one night the friend of a friend was busy texting her boyfriend and walked into the canal. On the ridge of Moseley looking down towards Wales. Kings of the Heath. Louie King marked the paths of the unknown watercourses, following downhill in the places he knew water would go and flow. Louie knew Bunny from years back, the South Brum days, Kings of the Heath indeed, strange films in the old cinema, burned down now. Went on to America and Scandinavia and yet in the last years came back to Birmingham as though his aquatic compass led him there. Feared only the Swan, that thing of pre-Christian, pre-Jewish, pre-anything mythology, born from the screaming of the rocks themselves and rocked to nightmare by the slow movement of the dull canals.<br/>
Whatever Christ said on the cross, said Chevalier, I doubt whether it was 'bunt off you bunting Munt.' He was the Christ after all, and for all you are at this moment, to all intents and purposes, crucificed, you are not. Darren, in so many ways you are not. I suspect you may be the reverse Christ, which is not the Antichrist, it is something else. Your crucifice - believe me, that is Crucifiction and Sacrifice - will not go unnoted. What you, my darling Darren, have said, is far more profound and earthy than the words of the Baptised God, and your wilderness is indeed cracked and browned. I think you're a spy. Possibly the spy. Though you are not James Bond, nor would wish to be. And I an old man in a dry season.</p><p>I could feel the spikes within my skull, the staples of the Crown of Thorns.<br/>
You may be our one sacrifice to the Fourfold Continent, said Chevalier. It needs a new mythology, something to drive it, and a willing sacrifice would be that thing. You came of your own free will, did you not? Tell me, what of the afterlift? What about it?<br/>
I attempted to form words but none came. Only the mocking laughter of the dark that is within the light, and the light that is within the dark.</p><p>I alone am dark. Others are light, said the Sage. All is flow. </p><p>What do you think will happen, said Chevalier? Will the apes roll away the stone for you? What if we know the answer? What if the sacrifict brings the Swan, all the way from the dark lake? Dark is not bad, you know that. It simply is.</p><p>But Evil, said Chevalier. Now that is the fun part. I mean me, I'm a stock French music-hall sadist, the sort of person who shags his mistress in the afternoon, goes to the Opera on a Saturday night - remember that in the 19th century, the age of the impressionists and other kinds of comedian, the Opera wasn't the highbrow affair it is now - and indulges in some truly horrifying behaviours. Voila pour moi la plus belle musique du monde. Did you ever hear Louis Moll's Agony Rag? Ragtime music accompanied by horrifying screams at the end of each verse? And earlier, the music of Jochen Erdss, a German exiled to Paris, whose music encapsulated his visions of a world of pain as entertainment? That he also scored the human fart as an instrument may suggest he was not entirely serious, but who knows? Deus escreve direito por linhas tortas. Think outside the sandwich box, and if that ain't Taoist you can kiss my ass.</p><p>One of our previous candidates, he muses, was kept in darkness all night until the screams no longer sounded like anything human.<br/>
Old Chevalier smiles.<br/>
If I had a mobile phone, he says, I would have those screams as my ring tone, especially the early-morning ones; they were savourable. More apelike gibbering and post-linguistic pleading than anything else.<br/>
He smiles again, remembering, gently.<br/>
It is remarkable how quickly the human organism reverts to the primal chimp under such amusing circumstances.<br/>
Darren cannot see the smile as he is masked; but he feels Chevalier's amused and reverent silence.</p><p>Darren says nothing. He is theoretically able to speak but not sure that his tongue has not been burnt to the root nor his teeth knocked out with a rifle butt; as Chevalier points out,<br/>
These things are most feared by those who talk too much. It's wot yer call Symbolism. Like castrating peasant men - feared by those whose identity is bound up with sex - or disembowelling women - removing the source of generating new lives.</p><p>Darren is taken down from the Cross, the staples drawn from his skull and the mask removed, all accoutrements removed and wrapt in a winding sheet, and laid in the crypt where there is no light. A simple jug of water which he detects by feel alone. </p><p>Darren is alone in darkness and as he is in darkness the Fear starts in. In the dark, a lot of things could happen. A lot of spiders could brush his cheek. The stone could be rolled away three days from now and Darren dragged forth to his real and final death. As Chevalier said,<br/>
The Reverse Christ. Death after the stone is rolled away. Not true blasphemy as who would care? You have three days and nights, though to be honest, you won't know. There is no time in the dark.<br/>
So, he thinks. When I next see daylight it will be my last ever daytime.<br/>
He starts to sob.<br/>
I dont wanna die, he says, screaming louder until his throat is raw.<br/>
Later on the words are lost and become undifferentiated screaming such as your actual, or present author often hears around him.<br/>
Later still, as Chevalier had suggested, they are howls and gasps and gemissements and bemerding himself like a trapped animal (releasing internal unnecessaries in order to facilitate flight, though flight rarely comes ... consider why bats shit constantly. You have to be light for flight. Drop any extra weight).</p><p>Howling like a trapped animal, finding a wall and smashing his head against it in horror. His head, already weakened by the insertion of staples during the Crown of Thorns episode, does not take this very well, but he resists the obvious inference of killing himself. </p><p>I dont wanna die, he screams again.<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I want to live<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
Please don't kill me<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
Please don't do this<br/>
Please don't kill me<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I want to live<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
Please please please<br/>
I want to live<br/>
I want to live<br/>
I want to live<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
I dont wanna die<br/>
Please let me live. Please please please ...</p><p>and so on until a voice comes from above:<br/>
Nobody cares what you want.</p><p>Now it would be pleasant to recount that at this precise moment Darren was enlightened; that the phrase Nobody cares what you want, like War is God, hit a chord of absolute enlightening Truth.<br/>
That the Cosmos is indeedy a very fucked-up place but at the same time it is not, and the most enduring gods and monsters have been those like the Cthulhu mythos who are indifferent to humanity, seeing it if they do at all like a tiresome pest.<br/>
Those who remember those trippy Catty and the Major cartoons from the 1970s will recall the brutal indifference towards life and suffering evinced by the protagonist Catty, who may have been a parody of the stoned hippie supposedly Aware but actually oblivious to his surroundings, or may have genuinely been a Taoist protagonist like Pooh. Or Bod. Kneel before Bod; you will, for he won't kneel at all.</p><p>This however does not enlighten our Darren, or does not appear to (though who knows?) as he carries on screaming in a way that would have made Hattie Jacques and Sid James proud. </p><p>Here's Fred<br/>
he could be locked in a shed<br/>
until he's dead.</p><p>And so on. All those screams are high-octane beauty. Perhaps the universe was set in motion by a Scream, one that lasted forever as its echoes still reverberate around the cosmos. Billions and billions of stars. All powered and blasting forever outward on the original Ur-Scream. Before the Scream all was darkness and inchoate blobbiness. Then the Scream brought light from darkness, Thing from no-Thing. The dark contains the light, the light contains the dark. There are stars so distant, and receding so fast, that we cannot see them for their light has not yet reached us; else the night sky would be blinding white.</p><p>So you're saying the Scream is the Tao?<br/>
The Tao is the Tao. It cannot be named.</p><p>I'm not saying anything about Lobsters either, other than, Consider them. Meanwhile Darren is still screaming, and is screaming when the stone is rolled away and he is dragged into the light like a kind of human travois assembled from the bones of dead mules and lashed together with rotted strips of hide and dragged behind Eeyore-like beasts of draft in a place where only bent grass flourishes in the wind over the seawall and the land is brown and cracked and mud houses built by nameless autochthons, generation after generation from a time when the written word and the wheel were undiscovered -- dragged like a crucified Christ in the streets of a hill-town under a hot, indifferent sky, white domes and cisterns and reeking alleyways and godowns, the greenblue hills tumbling to the sea (the Ancient Greeks had no word for blue. I find it more likely they had no word for green, but apparently it was blue. 'ble' is a modern loan-word.). </p><p>What did the Christ say in those reeking pre-Christian streets, the locals with the fish sign daubed on their foreheads, the sound of flogging and hammering in the early mornings, hypnogogic chants to the Virgin Mother resounding in the streets and the dark cool courtyards? Sunlight in the early morning slides off the tiled roofs like rain. A late cat slinks away. Water runs in small cold bathrooms.<br/>
What did Christ say on the Cross? Father, why have You forsaken me? That same indifference of the Gods; yet Darren's curse, Bunt off you Bunting Munt is earthier and less knowing. That most Darrenish of all phrases:<br/>
Bunt off you Canker!</p><p>What if it was all a Godgame, then? A crucifiction? But the stringing up was real enough, and the bastinado; even if he could walk he could not for his feet are wrecked. Three days and the stone is rolled away. Darren, screaming. And the Crown of Thorns, the staples wicked into his skull, leaving holes that are still sore, even if in this dry cool season they stand less risk of infection. He is still blinking in the unaccustomed light. </p><p>Darren screams all the way to the place of execution, his personal Golgotha with its rickety chair and its wall whose bullet holes are mere pockmarks in the sallow white face of the early morning. Screams as two faceless darkmen seize him and tie him to the chair, and screams as he is faced by the urbane figure of Chevalier, his dove-grey suit impeccable, his white silk shirt and dark blue cravat, his black shiny leather shoes; his hair neatly coiffed. Screams to face his own reflection in Chevalier's untroubled eyes. Screams as the darkmen and their three colleagues unshoulder rifles and go to take their firing positions. </p><p>Chevalier faces the screaming man tied to the rickety chair.<br/>
"Well, well," he says. "So, we meet at last, Mister Darren." He smiles, that urbane smile.<br/>
Darren is still screaming.<br/>
"I think this has gone far enough," Chevalier says, and to the darkman standing behind Darren,<br/>
"End it."<br/>
And to Darren's astonishment the man unties the knot.<br/>
"We aren't going to kill you," says Chevalier to Darren, whose screams are rapidly becoming gulps. "Why would we do that?"<br/>
Darren, head swimming, hauls himself upright, and with all his remaining strength punches Chevalier in the side of the head. A fine roundhouse punch given the debilitated state of the puncher.</p><p>"You bunting Munt," says a sobbing Darren. Chevallier rubs his cheek.<br/>
"What," says Chevallier, "we wind you up for ages and that is all you have to say? I appreciate, we did wind you up and I am sure you are angry because of that but ..."<br/>
"That isn't it," says Darren. "That isn't it at all.<br/>
"You stopped.<br/>
"I was looking forward to it."</p><p>In the heartwood of this strange new continent, the Swan folds its wings.</p><p> </p><p>THE END<br/>
SORT OF</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I wrote this in 2018.  Apparent influence of “Nebulous” is odd as I had never heard of that series and didn’t hear an episode – as far as I am aware – until October 2020.<br/>“Radioactive Cxck Scorpions” can be seen as preparatory work for “Dark Castles” (2020).</p><p>We also heard from:</p><p>The Magus<br/>Cities of the Red Night / The Red Night Trilogy<br/>Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West<br/>The Collected works of TS Eliot<br/>The House at Pooh Corner<br/>Martyrs<br/>Shot At Dawn<br/>Walking on the Bones (2020)<br/>The Holy Bible<br/>The Dao De Jing (The Book of the Way and Its Virtues)<br/>The Collected Works of Racey Helps<br/>Hookland</p></blockquote></div></div>
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